Bottled drinks in flavors are very popular. These flavored bottled drinks may be intended for energy or performance enhancement, or simply to satisfy a thirst. Bulk merchandise stores, e.g. Costco, Sam's Club, are also popular since they give the customer an actual or perceived value by selling products in larger sales units. In this way, bulk merchandise stores have become a popular consumer source of flavored bottled drinks.
Bottling plants that provide these flavored drinks, for reasons of efficiency, produce and bottle a single flavor of drink for as long as possible. The bottling plant will fill bottles with a flavor, place the filled bottles in reusable shallow corrugated trays and wrap the trays with a transparent film sheet for storage and shipping. The packed tray may contain 12, 24 or other quantity of filled bottles. Trays are then placed on pallets for shipment. A bottling plant may fill and warehouse a single flavor drink for weeks before switching to a different flavor.
However, customers are expressing a preference to buy a variety of flavors rather than a tray containing 24 bottles of a single flavor. A demand has been found for bottled drinks in a tray containing a variety of flavors. In a tray, e.g. of 24 bottles, 6 bottles of each of four flavors has become a recently popular sales unit in the bulk merchandise stores. Since the bottling plants are set up to run long production batches of a single flavor, creating a variety sales unit tray must be treated as a secondary operation. The secondary operation, a mixing plant, will reuse the original trays for reasons of economy.
In the process of converting single flavor trays to multiple flavor trays, the film wrap covering the input single flavor tray noted above must first be removed before the bottles can be lifted and transferred to another tray. Current film wrap removal has been a fully manual operation in which the worker places the single flavor tray on a surface, inverts the tray and contents, cuts an “X” or other pattern through the film covering the tray bottom, re-inverts the tray to upright, and pulls the film up and off to expose the bottles, depicted in FIGS. 1A-1D of this application. A tray filled with 24 bottles containing 16 ounces of liquid each weighs approximately 50 pounds. In addition to the time involved and the strenuous act of inverting the tray of bottles twice, the manual cutting frequently damages the trays and may result in the worker sustaining cuts to the hands, worker injury and increased insurance costs. When a cut involves bleeding, the bottle processing operation must be shut down and disinfected according to Federal Food And Drug Administration regulations, a process that takes approximately 45 minutes. During this 45 minute cleaning, no production is accomplished on this conveyor line.
Therefore, a need exists for an apparatus for assisting in removing the film wrap from a tray of filled bottles that reduces the time and labor involved, reduces the damage to the trays, and eliminates the danger of worker injury.